Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterHD Slow Mo with Phantom, Part 2
Jul 21, 2008 11:18 AM
Last time, we spoke with Cinematographer Jim Matlosz about the postproduction process he uses after shooting the kind of high-end digital slow motion work he's been doing with the Vision Research Phantom HD camera. The cinematographer spoke about issues pertaining to the company's proprietary raw file format and the importance of understanding postproduction workflow issues prior to shooting.
Matlosz has been shooting and working as a technician in the field of high-speed photography for more than a decade, primarily with Photo-Sonics film cameras before expanding into digital work, and we also wanted to get his thoughts about the state of that art.
He has found Vision Research camera gear to be the best tool for digital high-speed work. The Phantom HD and other iterations of Phantom technology, including the lower-res/higher-speed Phantoms for situations where speeds beyond 5000fps is more important than the trade-off in resolution over the Phantom HD, which cannot exceed 1000fps. But Matlosz says that even the Phantom HD's sensors are not equivalent to film in terms of resolution or dynamic range. He still recommends Photo-Sonics cameras running 35mm film for every high-speed job he does—if the client can afford it.
The financial barrier to shooting high-speed film jobs, he says, is not the film or the equipment itself. "It's really the telecine that's making it impossible to shoot film," he says. "You get quotes like $1,200 an hour, $2,000 an hour. It's insane. So more and more people shoot HD and take the telecine part out of the loop altogether."
When absolute precision and color rendition is required as it was for a greenscreen-intensive sneaker spot for a Chinese company he shot last year, he still runs film through a Photo-Sonics camera. In the commercial, basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal dribbles a ball against a massive greenscreen. "I really recommend shooting film if you're doing a lot of greenscreen or bluescreen work," Matlosz says. "We know that if everything's lit properly we can pull a matte. With the HD process, there's still some guesswork involved."
Matlosz tested the Phantom HD's sensor extensively, and he has decided to always give it an exposure index of 500. "But like most digital cameras," he says, "you have a narrower dynamic range than you would on 500-speed film, especially in the highlights."
Of course, the 500 is just a starting point as high-speed photography—regardless of the medium—requires boosting light levels. Double the number of frames per second and you have to double the amount of light to get the same exposure. So it's easy to imagine how some of Matlosz's super high-speed work can require hundreds of thousands of watts of light.
Lighting artistically for a set using this kind of horsepower, Matlosz explains, requires a specially trained eye. To a casual observer or even a cinematographer experienced with lighting for normal-speed photography, a set will look entirely blown out with areas that will read as shadow information looking extremely bright. "Every job has its own style of lighting," Matlosz says, "but I like to go through tons of thick heavy diffusion. That's another reason I bring so much light to a shoot."
The cinematographer admits, of course, that with the kind of digital cinematography he does with the various Phantom cameras, it is possible to use the HD-SDI output to send images to a DVR or tape deck and play them back to see how they read. But he stresses that this is no substitute for the type of experience he's attained and the ability he had to develop while shooting film to previsualize the look he wants before even ordering the lights. "A lot of people who are thrown into the world of high speed from something else are just happy to get an exposure,” Matlosz says. “They don't know how to paint and sculpt with 100,000 watts of light."
See more examples of Matlosz’s work at www.dpmatlosz.com.
